‘Hired guns’ live for fighting fires

Jace Radke

Wednesday, June 7, 2000 | 11:18 a.m.

PAHRUMP -- Besides polaskis, helicopters and tons of yellow and green fire resistant Nomex clothing the 660 wildland firefighters who are battling the Buck Springs fire also brought to Southern Nevada a culture uniquely their own.

Wildland firefighters bounce from fire to fire, literally stopping only long enough to douse the flames before jumping back in a truck and heading off to the next blaze.

Dale Pfau, a firefighter from Montana who arrived in Pahrump Monday night after a long drive from a Colorado fire, said seeing the country from the back of a fire truck is the only way to travel.

"I started doing this seven years ago, and I've traveled all over the country fighting fires since then," Pfau said, as he rested at the Pahrump base camp Tuesday afternoon. "I probably got hooked on fighting fires when I saw the coverage of the 1988 Yellowstone fire."

Fire central for the Buck Springs fire is on the west end of Pahrump at the fairgrounds where over 100 small dome tents dot a field surrounded by portable showers, bathrooms and kitchens. Cheyenne and Crow Indian crews from Montana, Nevada inmate crews and elite hotshot teams from six Western states are among those working and living together as they battle the fire.

Pfau is a member of the Bitterroot hotshots, named for a valley in southwest Montana.

Hotshots are highly trained ground crews that work at the flash point between moving walls of flame and unscorched land. They dig fire breaks, put out hot spots and light backfires to suck oxygen from fires, said Jack Sept of the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho.

"The hotshots have more experience and training than your average ground crews, and they stay together every season," said Sept, who serves as the Bureau of Land Management's Chief of External Affairs. "They take a lot of pride in their names and the job they do.

"Think of them as the hired guns."

If the hotshots are the hired guns, the seasonal district crews, known as "ground pounders," are the local law. Both groups basically do the same job, but the seasonal crews are where college students and less experienced firefighters work and are used as a training ground for future hotshots.

"The local crews catch 94 percent of the fires before they get big enough for us to call in hotshots or other resources," Sept said. "They are the initial attackers, and on most fires the bottom line comes down to ground pounders with polaskis."

A polaski is a combination ax and hoe that serves as the primary tool for wildland firefighters along with chainsaws, emergency water containers known as bladder bags and shovels.

Those are the tools Darold Foote uses as part of a Cheyenne Indian group of ground pounders that are working 12-hour shifts in the mountains near Wheeler Pass west of Mount Charleston.

"We have a lot of very good firefighters in our crew, the trick is getting them to try out to be hotshots," said Foote, who has nine years of fire fighting experience. "We have guys who have worked on helicopter crews and on engines. We probably have the experience to be a hotshot team ourselves."

Good-natured rivalries spring up between different crews at fires as they talk about who worked the hardest and made the biggest difference on the fire.

"We've got a good competition going with the Crow, but it's all in fun," Foote said. "When we get up there, we all work together."

Another topic of conversation in camp is the off-season, which some are always looking forward to as a long vacation from the heat and flames they face through the end of spring, summer and into the fall.

Then there are the ground pounders that like to talk about becoming a smoke jumper, the top spot in the fire fighting hierarchy.

"Those are the golden boys and girls of the outfit," Sept said. "Once you go that far you've got fire fighting in your blood. They parachute into remote areas and hold fires until more help can arrive, or put them out themselves."

Most of the Great Basin smoke jumpers, based in Idaho, have at least 12 to 15 years of fire fighting experience and are in their 30s, 40s and 50s. Every year as many as 100 fire fighters routinely try out for as few as two or three smoke jumper spots, creating a scenario where only the best are picked, Sept said.

"These people also have the experience to serve in managerial and coordinator roles at fires," Sept said. "We had some helping to coordinate at the Los Alamos fire."

Wherever they are in the food chain, most wildland fire fighters will tell you that they love what they do, said Clark County Fire Department spokesman Steve La-Sky, who got his start as a wildland fire fighter.

"It's a lot of hard work, but it's a lot of fun too," said La-Sky, who worked for four years as a wildland firefighter. "You miss driving across the West to remote places and mountain tops and traveling in the off-season on the cheap."